


Capturing Moods

by birdbrains



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - BDSM, Chronic Illness, Gen, High School, Secret Identity, Sibling Rivalry, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-25
Updated: 2015-03-25
Packaged: 2018-03-19 14:36:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3613614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/birdbrains/pseuds/birdbrains
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>just stashing this here because I might work on it for nanowrimo in 7 months.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Enigma

The girl on my driver's license, Harriet Parson, is dead. As for me, I'm just a mystery born and raised werewolf, now living as human, wrapped inside an enigma, and responsibly daydreaming while I wait on the platform for the train. Despite the license I can't drive anymore. The long term allergic reaction from touching silver has given me weird issues with depth perception, tunnel vision--even, sometimes, the basic ability to remember each moment chronologically and the same distance apart, like the lines on a ruler. It's probably not even visible to anyone I interact with, but it feels like I've gone to sleep for a few minutes in the middle of the day. I know nothing much happened--riding the train, at work, talking--but I should remember being there. I should remember time crawling along at its favorite glacial pace. 

I'm pretty sharp, though, today, early to catch the train, drinking coffee, letting one of my elbows rest on the silver railing at the back of the human train platform. The werewolf stop is about a block down and the drivers skip it if they're running late, which they often are. As Harriet Parson I can roll out of bed and be pretty sure of how long it will take to get somewhere. Werewolves have to get up early if they want be on time, and even if they do that, it usually doesn't work out.

Harriet's parents were actually nice, maybe the nicest any humans have ever been to me. They sold me all her documents; this creepy guy, Donald, had put me in touch with them because I looked pretty similar to Harriet. That was important so i could look like any old official pictures of her, like her passport when she went on a trip to Canada when she was thirteen.

But maybe looking like her also made her parents warm up to me. They made me tea in the kitchen--somebody probably told them that werewolves like tea--and we sat in the living room and drank it. To put them at ease, I stirred it with their silver spoon. It hurt me more than that kind of thing does now, but I kept my face impassive. 

"What's your name, honey?" Harriet's mom asked.

"It doesn't matter," I said. I took a big drink of tea and scalded my tongue, but due to my silver training I barely reacted. I don't even intend to fake things sometimes, but since I ran away from my birth family, concealing my emotions has come a lot more easily than sharing them. It's usually the safest option, so it's my default.

Harriet's mom pestered my birth name out of me, so I coughed it up. She asked me where I was from and I told her and she had a cousin who was from the same town and despite him being human, we had a few mutual acquaintances. This honestly freaked me out a little. I was scared they might tell him about me even though they weren't supposed to tell anyone; then he might find my parents and somehow they'd find out where I went. So when Harriet's mom asked me about my parents, I clammed up and couldn't make myself say anything, even lies

"Did they hurt you, ____?"

 I ended up being as honest as I've ever been to a human. "My parents didn't do anything bad to me, Mrs. Parson, but they're werewolves. They brought me into the world even though they knew I wouldn't have an opportunity to go to college or do anything important with my life. I love them, but I can't be their daughter anymore."

Ten years later this strikes me as mean, but I was sort of a mean kid. I knew I was smart and I didn't appreciate having to pretend otherwise to avoid intimidating humans.

Harriet's dad had been quiet--more suspicious than her mom, I think--but he asked what I wanted to do with my life that was so important.

"I want to be an engineer," I said 

"Really?" he said. "Are you dominant or submissive?"

"I'm submissive," I said. I didn't have to think about it because I had thought before about what was the best answer to give. Since humans don't have sexual roles, I think they assume that being dominant or submissive is as important to a werewolf's identity as their gender is to them. My  answer would have a big influence on how they perceived me.

If I said I was submissive they might perceive me as weaker, less intelligent, more likely to fail at my future career or at passing as Harriet at all. If I said I was dominant, though, they'd think I might be violent and aggressive, that with the right opportunities I could attack a human in a fit of rage. That was even more likely to get them in trouble than if I just submissively couldn't take the pressure and jumped off a bridge or something.

Besides, I am pretty competent and not at all shy. I felt like I could make them question their opinions of subs, but if I said I was a dom, any attempts to come off as sweet and delicate would just be awkward. I was sixteen, and probably hadn't cried since I was in the single digits.

It seemed like it was the right answer for Harriet's dad. At the time, I didn't really know what I was, but I also knew it didn't matter because I wasn't going to have contact with any other werewolves. I didn't need to know my sexual role if I wasn't planning on ever having sex. 

They actually let me come over and see them a lot when I started living as Harriet. Eventually I started drinking coffee instead of tea. Even more eventually, I started avoiding visiting them. I wanted to be as independent as possible, and even two pretend parents were more parents than I thought I needed. It's sort of hard to be a mystery wrapped in an enigma if you have any permanent relationships in your life.


	2. Vincent

My daydream is about my brother Vincent. He's certainly dead, but I gave myself a shadow of a doubt by running away from home and cutting all ties with my family a few weeks before his execution date. I'm sure there are places I could look up execution records but I have excellent self-control. If I start thinking about researching any of my family members or childhood friends, I don't even let that thought get all the way out of the gate. It's easy to control yourself if you really care about it.

It's okay to think about Vincent because of the unlikelihood of him being alive--and even if he was alive, the unlikelihood of us encountering each other. I live in a city only a few hours from where we grew up, but the streets are so frothing with people you could pass someone you know and not even see them. And since I'm human, we're not likely to see each other anywhere but the street.

In my fantasy, we see each other while he's waiting for the train. I am already aboard. We're late. The driver goes enough past the werewolf platform that it's clear he isn't going to open the doors for them. But another train is coming, and our train stalls. All the humans inside are looking out at a bunch of werewolves who just realized they're going to be late for work.

Vincent is among them--twenty-eight, now, I guess, and as flawless as ever. It's notable that I like to think of him this way, because when I was growing up nothing made me gladder than to see my brother trip, or lose his temper, or have less than perfect hair. Vincent was extremely handsome and seemed to get things he wanted just by smoldering in their general direction.

Within reason, of course. Werewolves usually were charmed by him, but humans found his confidence threatening. I guess that should be obvious from what I've already said. The point is, when I was younger the whole Vincent package--his loud, artless, graceless-but-graceful magnetism--just made me want to strangle him. I considered myself smart and always did what I was told; I was so blank I resembled pasta, and when compared to Vincent I might as well have been part of the wallpaper.

But now I don't resent Vincent's beauty anymore. Maybe it's because I've pulled off something really impressive with my life--most werewolves who try never manage to pass as human, and even those who succeed end up getting caught when, after years of burning themselves on silver utensils, they just can't take it anymore and put their sleeve over their hand while holding a fork. Or they just quit after a while because "it's so stressful"--that's a rationale I'll never understand, to be honest. What's more stressful than throwing your life away as a werewolf? I've made it ten years and counting without even hesitating about it--like I said, I'm pretty careful with the direction I let my thoughts go in.

The point is Vincent and I are both winners now. If I saw him now I wouldn't be mad at him for being the way he was. I'd be proud to have such a glowing, irrepressible brother.

Still, I'd like seeing his composure crack a little when he recognized me. Or he wouldn't recognize me, exactly, not consciously--even Vincent would know by twenty-eight not to stare at a human woman, but he wouldn't be able to stop his eyes from just sort of sticking on me through the windows of the train.

I dyed my hair blond when I became Harriet, and obviously I'm much older than the girl he remembers. (I won't be using my birth name. It's another of the thoughts I don't let out.) But you can't wipe the slate clean of everything and the train stalls for a second, another second, and Vincent's gaze is stuttering across my face.

I wave and smirk at him and he recognizes me. So he's staring at me with awe, shock--but also some kind of shared arrogance, a pleasure in the fact that his sister is pulling a long con on everyone. Our parents think I'm dead, humans--who think we're so biologically, holistically inferior--can't even tell the difference. He smirks back at me, and it's not just a power fantasy--he is awed and shocked and taken aback by me, sure, but also purely happy.

At some point, I start picking at the fantasy, adding little bad steps that I have to agonize over correcting. He's dead, of course, but more importantly he hated werewolves who do what I've done. We were sellouts, kicking our culture under the bus, playing into a society that thinks werewolves can't accomplish anything. Which is true, of course, but I'm not really principled and it's not like I could have fixed society by staying in my assigned life.

I still start to feel bad, though, knowing my imaginary brother is judging me, narrowing his eyes and thinking I should have died like everyone thought. I mean, would he be that cruel? Especially at twenty-eight could he still have been that idealistic? I'm not sure, but I am writing science fiction at this point, and the benefit of the fantasy--a feeling of well-being--is slipping away. No longer served by it, I turn it off.


	3. Grilled cheese

When I was in ninth grade, a boy named Carlos was my best friend. He also had a crush on me. He was submissive and he liked to do things for me like carry my books and bring me a bagel from the corner store in the morning. I like bagels, but I had to admit to him eventually that I didn't know if I was dominant or submissive yet, and that his favors didn't affect me in any way that could be romantic. He was pretty nice about it when I told him, and went back to treating me like a normal friend.

He was still pretty sweet and helpful as teenagers go, and one time he was over at my house trying to help me with a project for art class. The human art class got to do more original works, but in the werewolf class we basically just had to copy famous paintings a lot of the time. If I was more political I might have been mad about it, but I was such an unbelievably horrible artist that I was grateful to just rest on the laurels of the classical human masters.

This month, my attempt to paint The Last Supper had been so disappointing to our art teacher that she told me I could just do a pencil sketch of it. Even that was proving too much and I had to take home my Apostles and frantically try to add some lines and shading.

Carlos was a pretty good artist but he hated to cheat. Even though it was more or less the least lofty school project in history, he still refused to just draw it for me like I wanted. He sat there trying to correct my understanding of light and shadow and anatomy by painstakingly saying things like, "No...don't you think people's elbows usually look more like this?"

Eventually I had shaded the picture so much that it seemed like Jesus and the Apostles were eating a meal in the middle of a field of tall grass. You could see I had put a lot of work into it (I thought), and I refused to waste any more time. "I'm only canine," I said--this being a phrase Vincent used in a really different situation, when our father would reprimand him for the aggressive way he looked at girls. I think our father wanted Vincent to be more courtly in his dominance, but Vincent felt he was just so good looking, so shimmering with an alphatic charisma, that it made sense to leer until, magnetized, the submissive girls stumbled right into his teeth.

Carlos and I went into the kitchen to make grilled cheese and as I was buttering the pan, the devil himself appeared in a fake leather jacket (he couldn't afford a real one), walking across our front lawn while kissing his beautiful girlfriend, Emma Lin. He was kissing her and pulling her across the lawn so quickly that she kept losing her footing and almost falling into his arms. It was so transparent that when Carlos joined me at the window I thought he was going to make fun of them, but then I realized it wasn't going to happen. I was alone with my scorn.

"Holy shit, ____, your brother is so cool," Carlos whispered feverishly. Did he think Vincent could hear us through the walls, and while playing tonsil hockey? Carlos nudged me in the shoulder when I didn't say anything. Instead of buttering the bread, he was clutching it so hard it was molding into the shape of his hand.

"Give me that," I said.

"Look what he's doing! I want to kill her."

"This is stupid," I said. Reduced to buttering the bread and setting up the sandwiches myself, I was still pestered into watching as my brother scooped up Emma and started carrying her up to the stairs of our porch while she clung to his neck. "He's going to drop her."

"He must be so strong," Carlos said.

"Emma is just light. Besides--I give them three seconds. One, two, three." I flipped the sandwiches and Vincent tripped over the rotten step on our porch. He lost his balance and then his grip on Emma but, more alert than she was pretending to be, she landed on her feet which allowed him to remain standing as well.

"See?" I said. "He's a cretin."

"I don't know," Carlos said.

"Are you serious?"

"Even if he drops you it's, like, you never know what's going to happen. A lot of subs like that."

"You understand, you're basically saying you find concussions sexy."

I had nicely arranged our sandwiches on two blue plates when Vincent swaggered into the kitchen with Emma clinging to his arm and pretending to gasp for breath. "Jesus Christ," I said loudly.

"Hi ____," Emma said.

Vincent didn't say anything but just grabbed half my sandwich, stuffed it into his mouth, and pulled Emma back out into the hallway, in the direction of his room. "Fuck you Vincent," I mumbled, knowing he was too busy kissing already to hear me.

" _Awesome_ ," Carlos said.


End file.
